Apparently Penfold does not like spiders and another member does not like butterflies & moths so this thread is here so they don't freak out! Mind you having said that Penfold has just got his hands on thesort of lens you just HAVE to point at spiders

Chris wrote:Apparently Penfold does not like spiders and another member does not like butterflies & moths so this thread is here so they don't freak out! Mind you having said that Penfold has just got his hands on thesort of lens you just HAVE to point at spiders

That's just not going to happen Chris.

Super photos, by the way, how do you get your images to look so sharp? I've tried, but most of mine seem to look a bit on the 'soft' side, especially after I've tried cropping. Granted I haven't had any opportunity to try it out on insects yet, so any advice from an experienced hand would be welcome.

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Penfold wrote:Super photos, by the way, how do you get your images to look so sharp? I've tried, but most of mine seem to look a bit on the 'soft' side, especially after I've tried cropping. Granted I haven't had any opportunity to try it out on insects yet, so any advice from an experienced hand would be welcome.

Didn't Chris say he has a ring flash, that is the best way of delivering the light you need for sharp macro shots and a good one shouldn't cost you much more than £250

The knack of sharpness is the 'unsharp mask' (UM). ALL digital images need a little post processing to improve sharpness. The camera has to take a compromise on it's .jpg images and it's on the soft side.

I use Photoshop Elements 8 for post processing at the moment. The Unsharp Mask option dialog box looks like this.

It has three variables, Amount (A), Radius(R) and Threshold(T).

When you take picture you need to process A COPY!!! as follows.

If you intend to reduce the size of the image for display I have found the following process works quite well.

Set A=75%, R=1 to 1.5 and T=1

Apply to the image.

Resize the image.

Apply UM again, using the same values.

When you save the image there is little point in saving at a quality level greater than '7'. You get a much bigger file for no discernible quality improvement on screen.

Penfold wrote:Super photos, by the way, how do you get your images to look so sharp? I've tried, but most of mine seem to look a bit on the 'soft' side, especially after I've tried cropping. Granted I haven't had any opportunity to try it out on insects yet, so any advice from an experienced hand would be welcome.

Didn't Chris say he has a ring flash, that is the best way of delivering the light you need for sharp macro shots and a good one shouldn't cost you much more than £250